Jan 27, 2025
I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.
My model goes:
- FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”.
- Suppose...
Jan 27, 2025
Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do.
Why Priesthoods?
In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be...
Jan 26, 2025
I.
No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a...
Jan 26, 2025
What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?
Wait, What Even Is Flu?
Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors)...
Jan 26, 2025
Last week I wrote about how Claude Fights Back. A common genre of response complained that the alignment community could start a panic about the experiment’s results regardless of what they were. If an AI fights back against attempts to turn it evil, then it’s capable of fighting humans. If it doesn’t fight back...